Hugh Trevor-Roper

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Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (January 15, 1914 – January 26, 2003) was a notable historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany.

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[edit] Life

He was born in Glanton, Northumberland, England and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford in Classics and Modern History. Initially Trevor-Roper intended to make his career in the Classics but he became bored with aspects of Philology and switched to History. Trevor-Roper's first book was his 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which Trevor-Roper challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.

During World War II, Trevor-Roper served as a Military Intelligence officer. After the war Trevor-Roper made the claim that Kim Philby (one of his close colleagues, whom he knew and liked during the war) had successfully undermined efforts by the Chief of the German Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government. Later, in 1963, when Philby was discovered to be a Soviet agent, Trevor-Roper felt a deep sense of betrayal by his former friend.

In 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by the British government to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death and to rebut the claims of the Soviet that Hitler was alive and living somewhere in the West. The ensuing investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, 1947's The Last Days of Hitler, in which he traced the last ten days of the Fuehrer's life.

In 1950, Trevor-Roper attended a conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. In the 1950s and 1960s Trevor-Roper served as a frequent contributor to Encounter but in private was sometimes bothered by what he regarded as the overly didactic tone of Encounter. In particular, Trevor-Roper found the anti-Communism of Koestler and Borkenau to be too strident.

In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1980; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Having achieved his first major success with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as Hitler's Table Talk (1953) and The Goebbels Diaries (1978), although his speciality was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War.

In 1959, Trevor-Roper waged a successful campaign against the candidacy of Sir Oliver Franks who was backed by the leading dons for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford and had his patron the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan elected instead.

As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player in the so-called "storm over the gentry" (also known as the "gentry controversy"), a dispute with Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Stone over whether the English gentry were in economic decline or economic advancement in the century before the English Civil War, and whether this had anything to do with the outbreak of war in 1642. Stone, Tawney and Hill all argued that the gentry were in economic advancement and this caused the Civil War, while Trevor-Roper argued that the gentry were in decline and that was the Civil War's cause. A third faction, around J. H. Hexter and Geoffrey Elton, argued that the causes of the Civil War had nothing to do with either the alleged rise or decline of the gentry.

His attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by the historians Arnold J. Toynbee and Edward Hallett Carr and on his colleague A.J.P. Taylor's account of the origins of World War II, also won Trevor-Roper wide recognition. Another notable dispute was with Taylor and Alan Bullock over the question of whether Adolf Hitler had any beliefs or not. In the 1950s, Trevor-Roper was ferocious in his criticism of Bullock for his portrayal of Hitler as a “mountebank” (i.e. opportunistic adventurer) instead of the ideologue that Trevor-Roper believed Hitler to be. When Taylor offered a picture of Hitler similar to Bullock's in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, the same debate continued between Taylor and Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper frequently published articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines directed to the general public and appeared occasionally on television.

In regard to the Globalist-Continentalist debate between those who argued that Adolf Hitler had as his aim the conquest of the world vs those who argued that Hitler sought only the conquest of the continent of Europe, Trevor-Roper was one of the leading Continentalists. Trevor-Roper argued that the Globalist case rested upon taking a wide scattering of Hitler's remarks over several decades and attempting to turn these views into a systematic ideology. In Trevor-Roper's view, the only consistent objective Hitler sought was the domination of Europe.

A notable thesis propagated by Trevor-Roper was the “general crisis of the 17th century”. According to Trevor-Roper, the middle years of the 17th century in Western Europe saw a widespread break-down in politics, economics and society caused by a complex series of demographic, economic and political problems. Thus in Trevor-Roper’s “general crisis”, various events such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax of the Thirty Years War in Germany and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia were all manifestations of the same problem. The most important causes of the “general crisis”, in Trevor-Roper’s opinion, was the conflict between “Court” and “Country”; that is between the newly emerging (or would be newly emerging in the case of the Holy Roman Empire) centralizing, bureaucratic, sovereign nation-state and the traditional, regional, land-based aristocracy and gentry in the countryside. The “general crisis” thesis generated much controversy between those, such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who believed in the “general crisis” thesis but saw the problems of 17th century Europe as being more social and economic in origin then Trevor-Roper would allow and those who denied there was any “general crisis”.

One of Trevor-Roper's most successful books was his 1976 biography of the Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, who had long been regarded as one of the world's leading experts on China. In his biography, Trevor-Roper proceeded to expose Backhouse's life-story and virtually all of his scholarship as a fraud. The discrediting of Backhouse as a source led to much of China's history being re-written in the West as many of Backhouse's assertions, such as his claim that the Dowager Empress ordered the murder of her son were proven to be false.

On October 4, 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (March 9, 1907 - August 15, 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston, by whom she had had three children. His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner.

He was awarded a life peerage in 1979 and chose the title Baron Dacre of Glanton, of Glanton in the County of Northumberland.

At the age of sixty-seven, he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His election which surprised his contemporaries, was engineered by a group of fellows led by Maurice Cowling, then the leading Peterhouse Historian. Despite this, his relations with the fellowship (and indeed the porters) of Peterhouse subsequently proved to be confrontational.

The nadir of his career came in 1983, when, along with some others (the opinion among experts in the field was by no means unanimous; even David Irving, widely accused of Nazi sympathies, decried them as forgeries), he authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries, which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. The other experts asked to examine the diaries were Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg. The embarrassing incident was the last straw for his colleagues at Peterhouse, who took to calling him "Lord Faker".

Trevor-Roper's endorsement of the alleged Hitler diaries raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his integrity, because The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Lord Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a mistake. It was after this mistake that Private Eye nicknamed Trevor-Roper Hugh Very-Ropey. Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans in 1987) and his work continued to be well received.

Lord Dacre of Glanton died of throat cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89.

[edit] Work

  • Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 1940.
  • The Last Days of Hitler, 1947.
  • Secret Conversations, 1941-1944 (published later as Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944), 1953.
  • Historical Essays, 1957.
  • "The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century" pages 31-64 from Past and Present, Volume 16, 1959.
  • "Hitlers Kriegsziele" pages 121-133 from Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitsgeschichte, Volume 8, 1960, translated into English as "Hitler's War Aims" pages 235-250 from Aspects of The Third Reich edited by H.W. Koch, London: Macmillan Ltd, 1985.
  • "A. J. P. Taylor, Hitler and the War" pages 86-96 from Encounter, Volume 17, July 1961.
  • Blitzkrieg to Defeat: Hitler's War Directives, 1939-1945, 1965, 1964.
  • Essays in British history presented to Sir Keith Feiling edited by H.R. Trevor-Roper; with a foreword by Lord David Cecil (1964)
  • The Rise of Christian Europe, 1965.
  • Hitler's Place In History, 1965.
  • The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 1967.
  • The Age of Expansion, Europe and the World, 1559-1600, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1968.
  • The Philby Affair : Espionage, Treason, And Secret Services, 1968.
  • The Romantic Movement And The Study Of History: the John Coffin memorial lecture delivered before the University of London on 17 February 1969, 1969.
  • The Plunder Of The Arts In The Seventeenth Century, 1970.
  • Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginning of English "Civil History", 1971.
  • A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse (published in the U.S. as The Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse), 1976.
  • Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts, 1517-1633, 1976.
  • History and Imagination: A Valedictory Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 20 May 1980, 1980.
  • Renaissance Essays, 1985.
  • Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays, 1987.
  • From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 1992.
  • Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson. Edited by Richard Davenport-Hines. L.: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006 (ISBN 0-297-85084-9).
  • EUROPE’S PHYSICIAN: The various life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne, 2007 (ISBN 0-300-11263-7)
  • The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1969

[edit] References

  • Lloyd-Jones, Hugh; Pearl, Valerie & Worden, Blair (editors) History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H.R Trevor-Roper, London: Duckworth, 1981.
  • Saleh, Zaki Trevor-Roper's Critique of Arnold Toynbee: A Symptom of Intellectual Chaos, Baghdad: Al-Ma'eref Press, 1958.
  • Rosenbaum, Ron Explaining Hitler : the search for the origins of his evil New York : Random House, 1998 ISBN 0-679-43151-9.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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